Saturday, March 10, 2012

Lytro: The future of bird photography?

Lytro has a new type of camera called a light field camera. The major advance is that it captures more information with each photo so that you can refocus the photos AFTER you take them. In the photos above, click on the closer blue jay, the farther one, and the railing to see the effects of refocusing.

While I post some fairly nice photos at times, I take many more blurry photos that I don't show anyone. Refocusing later gets around this problem.

Now, the camera isn't perfect. It only has a 8x zoom, which is too little for most bird photography. The resolution isn't very good. When saved as a jpg (rather than live image as above), they are only about 1000x1000 pixels which isn't ideal for printing enlargements. I'm sure future versions will get around these limitations, but Mike will continue to play with his new toy.

The lytro format cannot directly be imported into photoshop or other photo editing software. Lytro does not (yet) provide any editing tools, e.g., adjusting color or cropping. The best you can do is focus the picture and export to jpeg and then edit in photoshop, picasa, etc. Right now, the camera is for early adopters.

I shot some duck photos today that I'll post soon. Waterfowl are large enough that the the zoom is okay. While for most photos, there is no need to switch between several subjects in focus, it's nice not to have to think about focus when shooting.

A Ducky Day

Pied-billed Grebe

Green-winged teal

Hooded Mergansers

Common Mergansers

We've been lucky to have a few more fancy ducks this year. The teal only stayed for a few minutes, but the grebe, and hooded mergansers have been here a while. The common mergansers are less common here, but we've seen them a few days.

Grackle and Squirrel

The grackles have come to town. Another nuisance - or so we at first thought! Chris was driving them off and looking online for inventive ways to get rid of them when she discovered maybe it's not so bad to let them hang around. They are only here for a few weeks, and they eat bugs! If they're willing to eat the awful centipedes that sometimes wind up in the house, we're all for letting them stay! Now, whatever is going on with the head of this one we don't know. They usually have a beautiful shiny blue head, but this one either has some albino traits or a bad case of alopecia or mange or molting or something. We're willing to let them hang around but not all that interested to spend more time figuring out the odd looks of this one.

There's a new philosphy around here; if you cant beat them, join them. Even though it's been a very tame winter this year, there were a few very cold days when the squirrels looked miserable and hungry. They continued to raid the bird feeders, driving Chris crazy, so she broke down and bought them their own corn cob treats. They ate through those pretty quickly and seemed most appreciative. Since they are sort of comical and fun to watch when they're not invading the birds' territory, Chris decided to put out some over ripe strawberries to see if they would like those. Seems it's best to keep the little critters occupied with treats which keeps us all happy.

Jersey Birding Links

Birds at the Bird feeders

About us

For those of you visiting this site who do not know us, we thought we would offer a brief explanation of how it all happened. We have lived in several different states, including Connecticut, New Hampshire, California, Virginia, and New Jersey. The house we rented sits right on a small lake, so we initially saw lots of geese and some mallards, rather mundane yet enjoyable. There seemed to also be an abundance of woodpeckers, and we started putting suet out for them. Mike frequently gets up early, and while working from his desk in the window this past fall, he noticed something other than geese on the lake. At first it started with a Pied-billed grebe, and then we also saw briefly a Wood Duck or two, a few Ring-necked ducks, Bufflhead, and then the gorgeous Hooded Mergansers. Well, we’ve fed birds before at other homes, but we’ve never lived on water, and we were especially fascinated by the beauty of the Hooded Mergansers. We have two grown daughters and family sprinkled around the US, and we were constantly e-mailing them pictures of the birds and ducks, so we decided it would just be easier to put them up on the web to share. We are not real die-hard birders, and we have no formal photography training. We’re just a couple who is enjoying the birds and waterfowl of their own backyard and wanted to share them. So, you may find more professional pictures somewhere else, but we hope you enjoy our site as well.

We moved back to California in June 2012, and we've started a new blog, California Birds. Here are our most recent California photos.